Blogger is a popular choice for creating classroom blogs and personal blogs because it can be accessed through your Google account and because it is easy to use to start a blog. In a matter of a few minutes you can have a new blog up and running through Blogger. Blogger offers lots of simple design customization options. One of those options that until yesterday I overlooked for more than a decade is the option to change the favicon.
The favicon is the little icon that appears next to a blog's title in your browser tab. Changing it is a nice and simple way to customize the appearance of your blog and make it stand out when visitor has a dozen other tabs open on his or her computer. In the following video I demonstrate how to change the favicon on a Blogger blog.
ChatterPix Kids is one of my favorite digital storytelling apps for elementary school students to use. For many years the app was only available in an iPad version. Earlier this year an Android version was released by the developers, Duck Duck Moose.
ChatterPix Kids is a free app that students can use to create talking pictures. To use the app students simply open it on their iPads or Android devices and then take a picture. Once they've taken a picture students draw a mouth on their pictures. With the mouth in place students then record themselves talking for up to thirty seconds. The recording is then added to the picture and saved as a video on the students' iPads or Android devices. Watch my tutorial videos below to learn how to use ChatterPix Kids on Android devices and on iPads.
Applications for Education
My all-time favorite example of students using ChatterPix Kids is found in this Next Vista for Learning video titled A Healthy Meal. To create the video students recording a series of ChatterPix Kids talking pictures and then the talking pictures were combined in a sequence in iMovie.
Earlier this year I worked with a Kindergarten class in which the students used ChatterPix Kids to create talking pictures of characters from their favorite books including Curious George and Clifford the Big Red Dog.
Last year TED-Ed started publishing a series of video lessons titled Why Should You Read...? Each lesson is about a classic work of literature that many of us have read and have made our students read. When making our students read those classics we've all been asked, "why do we have to read this?" This TED-Ed series attempts to address that question by explaining the historical significance of classic works.
The latest lesson added to TED-Ed's Why Should You Read...? series is Why Should You Read Hamlet? With this lesson the list of Why Should You Read...? lessons is up to eleven titles. All of the videos from those lessons are embedded below.
